Search

The article presents the author's views on the ontological turn in Mesoamericanist ethnology. Topics discussed include relation between ethnography and ontology, social conditions in emerging countries, national problems faced by ethnologists, poststructuralism, criticism on ontologism and multinaturalism.

Explanation has played myriad roles in truthmaker theory. The notion of explanation is sometimes thought to give content to the very idea of truthmaking, and is sometimes used as a weapon to undermine the entire point of truthmaker theory. I argue that the notion of explanation is dialectically useless in truthmaker theory: while it’s true that truthmaking offers a form of explanation, this claim is theoretically unilluminating, and leaves truthmaker theorists vulnerable to various kinds of attack. I advocate an alternative approach to truthmaker theory that downplays the role of explanation, and show how it releases the enterprise from a variety of problematic commitments that have troubled truthmaker theorists. The “ontology-first” approach to truthmaking that I advocate not only restores the initial impulse behind truthmaking, but also has a number of theoretical advantages. Most prominently, it dodges the infamous problem of negative existentials, and lessens truthmaker theory’s dependence on contentious intuitive judgments about both explanation and truthmaking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What if—in light of the escalating pace of academic production—scholars adopted a Slow Ontology? Because this question moves beyond slowing the pace or volume of productivity to address underlying issues of ontology, it asks not how we can find a slower way of doing scholarship, but how we can find a slower way of scholarly being. A philosophy of Slowness has sparked movements around the globe regarding Slow Food and Slow Cities; these and similar movements disrupt daily practices that prioritize speed, efficiency, and output at the expense of quality. In response, a Slow Ontology approaches writing as a site of creative intervention. This article offers methodological possibilities for writing a Slow Ontology in qualitative inquiry: each attends to how we might write the materiality of our local environments. In writing a Slow Ontology, researchers might create writing that is not unproductive, but is differently productive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through utilizing correlative ontology, which is derived from ancient Chinese philosophy, this article offers a redefinition of the individual (subject), which subsequently helps to problematize the ‘particular versus universal’ distinction. It is then shown how correlative ontology might be useful for criticizing and stimulating the English School of International Relations and its two main views (i.e. solidarism and pluralism) on humanitarian intervention. The significance is that correlative ontology helps to challenge ‘solidarism qua universalism’ and ‘pluralism qua particularism’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How can a metaphysics of abstract entities be built upon a metaphysics of time? In this paper, I address the question of how to accommodate abstract entities in a presentist world. I consider both the traditional metaontological approach of unrestricted fundamental quantification and then ontological pluralism. I argue that under the former we need to impose two constraints in the characterization of presentism in order to avoid undesired commitments to abstract entities: we have to characterize presentism as a thesis only about the concrete, and we also need to avoid the widely held distinction between tensed and tenseless senses of existence. Under ontological pluralism, instead, I argue that we can naturally accommodate any view of abstract objects in a presentist world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this article is to present speculative presuppositions of Italian critical ontology, a philosophical movement started by the work of Pantaleo Carabellese in the fi rst half of the 20th century, which is still active primarily at the Italian University in Perugia. Carabellese´s life itself was a proof that authentic philosophical refl ection leads to the affi rmative position on God as the fundamental condition and the basis of human existence that, as such, represents, in his words, »the only true object of philosophical refl ection«. In the fi rst thirty years of the author´s work, starting with the defence of his diploma thesis on Rosmini at the University of Naples in 1907 until the publication of The Theological Problem as Philosophy in 1931, theoretical relevancy of the concept of being as the unique basis of consciousness has been affi rmed. At the same time it has become obvious that a refl ection that, on the basis of its own presuppositions, does not necessarily aims for theological outcomes of its own speculation, cannot not refl ect on God, if it approaches the argument of contemplative nature in an authentic way. The true »object« of philosophical refl ection is, therefore, the theological argument, while philosophy is a true journey towards the metaphysical awareness of God. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the concept of "state of nature" Rousseau builds up a hypothetical model of a phenomenon and then he draws its consequences for the present. The "hypothetical and conditional reasoning" does not want to enlighten the origin of things but to show its nature and in the same time to reproduce that sort of speech situation which allows to " judge" the status of the present time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

OntoClean is an approach towards the formal evaluation of taxonomic relations in ontologies. The application of OntoClean consists of two main steps. First, concepts are tagged according to meta-properties known as rigidity, unity, dependency and identity. Second, the tagged concepts are checked according to predefined constraints to discover taxonomic errors. Although OntoClean is well documented in numerous publications, it is still used rather infrequently due to the high costs of application. Especially, the manual tagging of concepts with the correct meta-properties requires substantial efforts of highly experienced ontology engineers. In order to facilitate the use of OntoClean and to enable the evaluation of real-world ontologies, we provide AEON, a tool which automatically tags concepts with appropriate OntoClean meta-properties and performs the constraint checking. We use the Web as an embodiment of world knowledge, where we search for patterns that indicate how to properly tag concepts. We thoroughly evaluated our approach against a manually created gold standard. The evaluation shows the competitiveness of our approach while at the same time significantly lowering the costs. All of our results, i.e. the tool AEON as well as the experiment data, are publicly available. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the views of philosopher Joel Katza on the limitations of dispositionalism. The article adds that Katza presents what seems like powerful case against dispositionalism. For his argument purports to show that the principle of least action cannot be grounded in the dispositional properties of objects, as the thesis of dispositionalism requires. Therefore, there is at least one law of nature that needs to be independently grounded. Moreover, this law is a fundamental one. For without the principle of least action, or some general principle of equal power, the specific dispositional properties of things could tell us very little about how these things would be disposed to behave.

The article discusses the limitations of dispositionalism. The article argues that dispositionalism is incompatible with the Principle of Least Action (PLA). The article refers to theorist Brian Ellis who holds that while naive dispositionalism is incompatible with the PLA, sophisticated dispositionalism is not. Naive dispositionalism, according to Ellis, is the view that the world is ultimately something like a conglomerate of objects and their dispositions, and that, therefore, dispositions are the ultimate ontological units that explain events. Sophisticated dispositionalism, according to Ellis, supposes that how things are disposed to behave depends also on what kinds of things they are, what kinds of property they have, and how these kinds of things and properties are placed in the natural kinds hierarchies to which they belong.